Around 2:30 Wednesday I was congratulating myself. I knew I’d made it past the exact aspect of the last quarter Moon (Gemini Moon square Virgo Sun). I was still a few hours from completion of the Moon (emotions) square Mercury (ideas), but I was taking a little mental inventory and feeling pretty good about myself. Had I missed today’s forecast, I wondered. (It happens, especially when I’m reading the astrology from my rational mind rather than tuning into my whole mind-body awareness.)
Mental Inventory at 2:30 p.m.:
- Thoughts – Not bad at all, not a whole lot of hamster-wheel repetition or crazy fixation
- Focus – Could be better, but definitely within “acceptable” range for Mercury Rx
- Communication – Could be clearer, but again pretty good for Mercury Rx
Even as I was congratulating myself, I had a little nagging awareness that I might be jumping the gun. But one of the things about us addictive/abusive childhood types, one part of us is always waiting for the other boot to fall. We have a hard time accepting that things can go well without some sort of irrational punishment following hard on the heels. So I chalked it up to the old fear demons and kept rolling with my day.
Three hours later, the baby has broken out in hives again. Jenny and I are arguing about what to do, who to take him to in order to get him looked at. She’s frazzled, trying to make a salad upstairs while the baby is screaming his head off. I’m downstairs in my office trying to finish editing the September Video Forecast, which of course keeps jumping around and resetting itself in strange ways. I’m feeling my shoulders tighten up with stress, and now the monkey mind is going full-bore, blaming Jenny – “She should be able to handle this”
[Right now the monkey mind is telling me not to be so honest: "She'll read this and be mad at you all over again for blaming her!"]
…and most of all blaming myself: “You’re so tense. You should relax. This isn’t the most important thing on the Earth. If you were a better dad…You’re never going to meet all these deadlines anyway…”
AAGGH. Shut up already!
Next thing I know Jenny and I are arguing about something stupid – this after another block of screaming from the baby who in addition to his own problems is now picking up on our distress – and all of a sudden I get this other nagging feeling, “Just be honest.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about something Cathryn Taylor told me a couple months ago, that “Anger is truth unspoken.”
So I just blurt out to Jenny, “You know, I get stressed out too. I’m working on all these projects and working hard and stretching myself to pay the bills and I try to help with the baby too and it’s hard when he’s upset and then you’re upset and looking like you’re about to run away for good and I’m trying to stay focused and…”
And of course she’s starting to think I’m blaming her for my stress, too –
“…And I don’t even know what I’m saying, but I love you,” I shout.
And she looks up at me and smiles and it didn’t really matter what I said, just that I managed to speak my feelings without attacking her and she was going to attack me back but realized I wasn’t attacking and all of a sudden I felt the tension start to drain away. And a few minutes later I came back down to the office and looked at my ephemeris to find that Moon square Mercury is safely in the rear view mirror.
Ain’t astrology grand?
2 Comments
I really appreciate how you extrapolate larger lessons out of these split second interactions. It seems that all the information we need to understand what is going on is always present, the difference being sometime we are there to do the work and honestly look, and sometime we are in La La Land. I recently blew a fuse with a friend over a “shared object.” When i stopped to see what was really going on i understood i was mostly angry at myself for giving more energy than i thought was fair in our relationship which resulted in resentment and feeling taken advantage of. OH saturn, OH mercury. I prefer to call this quickening a ripening.
Thank you, Tara. I appreciate your story. Even though it hurts to blow a fuse at someone you care about, isn’t it wonderful to have that awareness of why? Like you in this event, my behavior patterns are usually passive = i don’t speak my truth, i let someone take too much and then i get resentful but don’t tell them i’m resentful and then when i finally do speak up there’s all this pent-up anger and aggression that can be quite scary. My experience has been, though, that once I understand that a certain behavior is going to lead to that scary, creepy end-place, it’s only a matter of time before I start modifying the behavior. Then the ugly interaction reveals itself as part of the cosmic pattern, a lighthouse guiding me away from the rocks…